Misc Changes

* Added option to “Use Some..” for stacks of items such as Crystals and Industrial Commodities
* Multiple client crashes fix
* Slight improvement to the client dump generation to help track and fix the remaining crashes.

Content Changes

* Kalthi Wrathful and Armored Blueprint requirements lowered: Kalthi Ship Plating 10 > 2, Reinforced Kalthi Essence 10 > 4.
* Changed Zeus Research Module to require 200 Platinum (was 2000)
* Sub-Shield Reactors Factory now consumes 50 Enriched Nuclear Waste every 1 minute (from 25)
* Base AI base price of Sub-Shield Reactors increased to 700.000 from 375.000
* Tamed Wasp fighters no longer do twice the damage they’re intended to do.
* Fixed “Rewired” giving +elec temp rather than -elec temp and corrected the description to show the actual bonus
* Removed the splash damage from the Demolishing and Neutralizing line of pulse guns. These weapons are still the highest DPS Mining and Radiation weapons you can acquire, but they were doing a very large amount of damage against multiple targets while still maintaining high DPS numbers.
* Ruby Carrier kill mission for Strontium (Silver base) fixed.
* Rumble Instance Rooms now have a 5 minute lockout.
* Nexus Map arrangement fixed, Arctia and Building Academy Entrance are now in the top right area of the Nexus layer.
* Particle, Singularity and Quantum Brakes nerfed to not be usefull in combat.
* Added missing newline to description of Translocators
* Twisted ship blueprints have gotten their relatively unnoticeable Microchip requirements changed to Sentient Chatbots
* Olympus ship blueprints now require 5 T21 modules of various kinds (down from 10-11) and 1 Adamantium Module (down from 2)
* Battle Sphere changes
** Battle Sphere and Battle Thatch weights have been increased from 3,000,000 and 2,000,000 to 30,000,000 and 20,000,000 respectively.
** Maneuvering Thrusters weight has been dramatically increased, and its Turning has been dramatically increased.
** Battle Sphere and Battle Thatch now have twice the diameter.
** Battle Sphere and Battle Thatch now have 50% Hostility augmod.
* Design pass on Plating X to bring it into line with power curve for other X gear. Tech 14-20 affected, up to 22% nerf to T20.
* Increased Twisted Extensive drone energy charge by 20% more.
* Increased Twisted Compact drone energy charge by 20% more.
* Increased max workforce amount from 10,000 to 100,000 on the Demented Titan Shield plus blueprint.
* Phoenix AI will now transform much sooner and has additional resistance when transforming and increased shield bank by 50,000.
* Converted Lunarium Dust to Lunarium Shard.
* Converted Lunarium Shard Blueprint to Lunarium Blueprint. Blueprints already installed wont be effected.
* Seprated the inbuilt items between the Voulge and Flamberge. The Voulge has recieved bonuses to its versions of the built in items. The old built in items will be deleted on the Voulge and Flamberge and will require the /outfithull command to install the new ones.
* Added Flamberge Charge Drone Device Superitem to Flamberge.
* Added Voulge Charge Drone Device Superitem to Voulge.
* Fixed -electric tempering aura mods and tweaks making weapons cost more energy, and vice versa.
* Fixed Blue Photon mission name typo and clarified the objective of Sweep the Asteroid Field Subspace daily.
* Fleet Commander Transwarps can no longer be sold to AI bases.

Bug Fixes

* Ships can no longer thrust and turn without an engine. Stats from auras, tweaks, zen skills, and engine skill will now no longer add into the turning or thrust of the ship if there isn’t already turning and thrust values from an engine.
* Attempting to thrust in a ship without thrust will no longer play the engine sound or create particles.
* Fixed the bug where class skills were giving skill point debt
* Fixed a bug where your possessions could charge your Gunner Analysis

Welcome to another Pixel blog where I, Pixel, will be going over what has been done over this past week.

Background Improvements

Yes! That wonderful default background of nebulae that has been around Star Sonata for quite a while now has been expanded upon! With eight more variants of backgrounds, expect next universe and possibly some current instances of this universe to have a more dyamic background than before!

Here’s one of many changes the new background visuals have produced.

Shipyards

Shipyards are now visually constructing dreadnaughts and battleships in Beta Antares once again, this will come next universe.

Industrial Commodities

DarkSteel and enkelin have been keeping an eye on the Industrial Commodities market and have some proposed tweaks for next universe.

SunDog

Some players have been experiencing issues with the Psychic Mastery mission for seers. Specifically, the repeatable version of the mission after you first complete it. Last night’s hotfix was to address this mission, the Psionic Flares will now appear in Bipolar. If this is the case, send in a support ticket (or contact me on the Star Sonata Discord) to have it removed from your character so you can repeat it.

Kraken, Poseidon’s miniboss, takes a while to spawn in. I’m looking into reducing the time it requires as dragging out the spawn time for so long doesn’t accomplish anything besides increasing the time to complete a Poseidon run.

Pixel

There has been some adjustments to the Voulge, Flamberge, and Flamlite where they were too similar so now they’ve received different arm amounts.

Flamlite has 3 arms.

Flamberge has 5 arms.

Voulge has 6 arms.

Pixel’s been adding even more skins, enjoy!

Additionally, changes to Lunarium Dusts and Selenite Dusts will become Shards, this will skip the process into just one step from shard to final commod. The existing dust commodities and blueprints related to dusts will automatically convert over to the shard versions. Existing dust blueprints installed on stations won’t be converted.

This patch is to address an unforeseen issue with base thrusters in bvb. It seems that they can currently be used by the defenders to indefinitely “outrun” a bvb attack and prevent loss of ownership and cause a loss of all attacking kits. This patch will be making the following changes:

*Base thrusters cannot be equipped (and will turn off if already on) on a kit that has been attacked in the last 5 minutes (sharing a timer with the base transfer rule).

*Bases outside of the userbase placement limits (over 30k from the nearest solarbody e.g. suns, planets, wormholes, etc) will not count for galaxy ownership. If the only kits in the galaxy are outside of this limit, the galaxy will go un-owned. If a galaxy is owned with kits outside of their team beyond the limits, they will be converted to bvb kits.

s_m_w

Has been hard at work adding new visual effects with the following new lightning bolt effect as shown below, enjoy!

Each shot is dyamically generated giving that shocking experience each time. Additionally while still in the works lasers has received a slight adjustment with a rounded tip. To be warned this is all subject to change due to future developments.

Jeff

Jeff has fixed the bug with class skills giving skill debt. Additionally he’s made a new tutorial event that triggers if you try to warp through a blocked wormhole.

Pixel

Pixel added a new skin for the Behemoth, Divine Behemoth, and Leviathan.

Other News

Bobbo

Bobbo is working on a simple new T20 DG uber, piloting a Vulture. It is not meant to be a huge new addition, but simply meant to make access to the Vulture/Aug Blueprint and Commodity a bit easier.

Jey

Jey is still trying to figure out Client crashes, but they are elusive, to say the least. (Or in jey’s words: “They make little to no sense which is **** annoying”)

He can however explain, and has fixed, the ocasional lag affecting the website. It seems to have been caused by the code that handles updating the test server.

Keep on sending crash dumps when you crash (simply click “yes”), the data has been extremely helpful! The client crash is a very weird one and jey is still not fully sure what is causing it, but he is making steady process. All my focus is on that (when the server isn’t crashing / lagging to death) and I am hoping to pinpoint it really soon. Quite a few things are being delayed while the crash hunt continues.

Hober Mallow

Demolishing and Neutralizing weapons are getting their splash damage removed, they are not the right weapons for a splash effect (High DPS, High DPE pulse guns). I’ll be saving the effect for a more appropriate weapon, preferably one that doesn’t have the highest Mining/Radiation DPS in the game. The other stats on the weapons will not change.

In working on invasions, I’ve found that the lower tier invasions don’t seem to serve the purpose they were originally intended for. Originally, they would provide something interesting for low level players to do. However, the fact that they are in a Premium zone meant that those players were not interacting with them very much. Going forward, there will be no invasions in the lower arms. The invasions and outposts will be locked to the Sas Arm, and the rewards from the other arms will be moved into other places.

Pixel

Scruples, Nightfuries and all their kin used textures that were, quite frankly, absolutely terrible. Pixel has been busy making them glorious once again!

He has also been working on a new boss, the Queen Hive, which is still in the early development stages but will enter the universe eventually.

s_m_w

I’ve spent a lot of time in the past few weeks getting myself acquainted with the client code, which is starting to bear fruit! Here’s a short video of my results from fiddling with lasers.

Bug Fixes

Recent Patches

Recently we’ve been pushing out a lot of patches and we appreciate you all for your help with constant feedback, reporting bugs, and fixes. Expect a couple more patches.

Bobbo

Bobbo been fixing some Easter bugs with some missions not giving rewards correctly, next patch. This includes a number of other bugs related around the Sniper but is still within the primalary stages of being fixed.

s_m_w

Some more background fixes related to gear balance issues.

Pixel

Has remade the Unt Faranji Wingship visual. He has also been poking about with HTML5/Javascript related scripts to apply to the player guide improvements.

Termites have also been looked at with the current result of the huge termite losing ¾ths its damage potential and lowered resistance from 98% to 90%.